The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium of companies including IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, academic institutions and federal agencies, is making members’ computers available for research in bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modelling projects requiring large amounts of processing capacity, to increase understanding of COVID-19 and inform strategies to address it. Research projects given access to date include a virtual high throughput in silico screen to find drug candidates, a molecular level simulation of the coronavirus entering a human host cell, and sequencing the genomes of patients who have suffered the worst effects of the infection to see if there is a genetic signature to the predict which future patients are most likely to need intensive care.

In addition to selecting which research to back, the consortium, led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the US Department of Energy and IBM, will identify which of their members has the most appropriate computing resource for each project.

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Who knew there was such a thing as (featured result from Google:

Office of Science and Technology Policy

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The Office of Science and Technology Policy is a department of the United States government, part of the Executive Office of the President, established by United States Congress on May 11, 1976, with a broad mandate to advise the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. Wikipedia

.@POTUS has named @WHOSTP Director Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier to serve as Acting Director of @NSF, effective March 31, 2020. “The future is bright, & the United States will continue to lead the world in science and technology as we transition...”-Droegemeierhttps://t.co/LQMMAuaTV2

Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist, has a long research record. But his views on climate change are not well known.

By Carl Zimmer, Aug. 1, 2018

President Trump will nominate Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist who studies severe storms, to be director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The director acts as the president’s chief adviser on science. The post has been vacant since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, by far the longest the office has been without a director since the position was created in 1976 [....]

The new science adviser to President Donald Trump has studied the causes and effects of extreme weather for nearly 4 decades. But meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier says he’s not a climate scientist and doesn’t want people to think he’s an expert on the topic.

That humble demeanor comes naturally to the 60-year-old academic, colleagues say. It may serve him well as the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which helps coordinate and create science policy across the U.S. government. In filling a post that was vacant for 2 years, Droegemeier faces the stiff challenge of making a difference in an administration that many researchers say has repeatedly shown disdain for scientific evidence.

In his first public interview since coming on board last month, Droegemeier pushed back on that criticism [....]

I'm always impressed with the ability to fellatiate Trump while not speaking in monosyllables. Still, what comes out is largely jism, ignoring both the gutting of federal dollars and underinvestment of the private sector since Reagan got in. A feel-good quote from Vannevar Bush in a different Democratic-led era of social responsibility 75 years ago is false equivalence.

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